Metro Santa Cruz:

The top censored news stories of 2005-2006

For 30 years, Sonoma State University's Project Censored has
released an annual list of the most important news stories not
covered by the corporate media in the United States. Here again are
the Top 10 news stories that didn't make much news.

1. Net Neutrality

Throughout 2005 and this year, a largely underground debate has
raged regarding the future of the Internet. More recently referred
to as net neutrality, the issue has become a tug of war with cable
companies on the one hand and consumers and Internet service
providers (ISPs) on the other. Yet despite important legislative
proposals and Supreme Court decisions throughout 2005, the issue was
almost completely ignored in the headlines until 2006. And except
for occasional coverage on CNBC's Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream
television remains hands-off to this day.

Most coverage of the issue framed it as an
argument over regulation, but the term
"regulation" in this case is somewhat
misleading. Groups advocating for net
neutrality are not promoting regulation of
Internet content. What they want is a legal
mandate forcing cable companies to allow
ISPs free access to their cable lines
(called a "common carriage" agreement). This
was the model used for dial-up Internet, and
it is the way content providers want to keep
it. They also want to make sure that cable
companies cannot screen or interrupt
Internet content without a court order.

Those in favor of net neutrality say that
lack of government regulation simply means
that cable lines will be regulated by the
cable companies themselves. Internet service
providers will have to pay a hefty service
fee for the right to use cable lines (making
Internet services more expensive). Those who
could pay more would get better access;
those who could not pay would be left
behind. Cable companies could also decide to
filter Internet content at will.

According to journalist Jason Leopold,
sources at Dick Cheney's former company,
Halliburton, allege that as recently as
January 2005, Halliburton sold key
components for a nuclear reactor to an
Iranian oil development company. Leopold
says his Halliburton sources have intimate
knowledge of the business dealings of both
Halliburton and Oriental Oil Kish, one of
Iran's largest private oil companies.

Halliburton has a long history of doing
business in Iran, starting as early as 1995,
when Vice President Cheney was chief
executive of the company. In an attempt to
curtail Halliburton and other U.S. companies
from engaging in business dealings with
rogue nations such as Libya, Iran and Syria,
an amendment was approved in the Senate on
July 26, 2005. The amendment, sponsored by
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, would penalize
companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by
setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to
legally conduct business and avoid U.S.
sanctions under the International Emergency
Economic Powers Act.

A letter, drafted by trade groups
representing corporate executives,
vehemently objected to the amendment, saying
it would lead to further hatred and perhaps
incite terrorist attacks on the United
States and "greatly strain relations with
the United States' primary trading
partners." The letter warned that "foreign
governments view U.S. efforts to dictate
their foreign and commercial policy as
violations of sovereignty often leading them
to adopt retaliatory measures more at odds
with U.S goals."

According to Leopold, during a trip to
the Middle East in March 1996, Dick Cheney
told a group of mostly U.S. businessmen that
Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and
Libya to foster better relationships, a
statement that, in hindsight, is completely
hypocritical considering the Bush
administration's foreign policy.

"Let me make a generalized statement
about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress
that I find disturbing, that applies not
only with respect to the Iranian situation
but a number of others as well," Cheney
said. "I think we Americans sometimes make
mistakes. ... There seems to be an
assumption that somehow we know what's best
for everybody else and that we are going to
use our economic clout to get everybody else
to live the way we would like."

Cheney was the chief executive of
Halliburton Corporation at the time he
uttered those words. It was Cheney who
directed Halliburton toward aggressive
business dealings with Iran--in violation of
U.S. law--in the mid-1990s, which continued
through 2005 and is the reason Iran has the
capability to enrich weapons-grade uranium.

It was Halliburton's secret sale of
centrifuges to Iran that helped get the
uranium enrichment program off the ground,
according to a three-year investigation that
includes interviews conducted with more than
a dozen current and former Halliburton
employees.

If the United States ends up engaged in a
war with Iran in the future, Cheney and
Halliburton will bear the brunt of the
blame.

Oceanic problems once found on a local
scale are now pandemic. Data from
oceanography, marine biology, meteorology,
fishery science and glaciology reveal that
the seas are changing in ominous ways. A
vortex of cause and effect wrought by global
environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean
from a watery horizon with assorted regional
troubles to a global system in alarming
distress.

The oceans are one, say oceanographers,
with currents linking the seas and
regulating climate. Sea temperature and
chemistry changes, along with contamination
and reckless fishing practices, intertwine
to imperil the world's largest communal life
source.

In 2005, researchers from the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory found clear
evidence that the ocean is quickly warming.
They discovered that the top half-mile of
the ocean has warmed dramatically in the
past 40 years as a result of human-induced
greenhouse gases.

One manifestation of this warming is the
melting of the Arctic. A shrinking ratio of
ice to water has set off a feedback loop,
accelerating the increase in water surfaces
that promote further warming and melting.
With polar waters growing fresher and
tropical seas saltier, the cycle of
evaporation and precipitation has quickened,
further invigorating the greenhouse effect.
The ocean's currents are reacting to this
freshening, causing a critical conveyor that
carries warm upper waters into Europe's
northern latitudes to slow by one-third
since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down
and cataclysmic climate change. This
accelerating cycle of cause and effect will
be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

Atmospheric litter is also altering sea
chemistry, as thousands of toxic compounds
poison marine creatures and devastate
propagation. The ocean has absorbed 118
billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since
the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with
20 to 25 tons being added to the atmosphere
daily. Increasing acidity from rising levels
of CO2 is changing the ocean's pH balance.
Studies indicate that the shells and
skeletons possessed by everything from
reef-building corals to mollusks and
plankton begin to dissolve within 48 hours
of exposure to the acidity expected in the
ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost
certainly disappear and, even more
worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton
absorb greenhouse gases, manufacture oxygen
and are the primary producers of the marine
food web.

Mercury pollution enters the food web via
coal and chemical industry waste, oxidizes
in the atmosphere and settles to the sea
bottom. There it is consumed, delivering
mercury to each subsequent link in the food
chain, until predators such as tuna or
whales carry levels of mercury as much as 1
million times that of the waters around
them. The Gulf of Mexico has the highest
mercury levels ever recorded, with an
average of 10 tons of mercury coming down
the Mississippi River every year, and
another ton added by offshore drilling.

Along with mercury, the Mississippi
delivers nitrogen, often from fertilizers.
Nitrogen stimulates plant and bacterial
growth in the water that consumes oxygen,
creating a condition known as hypoxia, or
dead zones. Dead zones occur wherever
oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level
necessary to sustain marine life. A sizable
portion of the Gulf of Mexico has become a
dead zone--the largest such area in the
United States and the second largest on the
planet, measuring nearly 8,000 square miles
in 2001.

It is no coincidence that almost all of
the nearly 150 (and counting) dead zones on
earth lie at the mouths of rivers. Nearly 50
fester off U.S. coasts. While most are
caused by river-borne nitrogen,
fossil-fuel-burning plants help create this
condition, as does phosphorous from human
sewage and nitrogen emissions from auto
exhaust.

Meanwhile, since its peak in 2000, the
global wild fish harvest has begun a sharp
decline. Progress in seagoing technologies
and intensified fishing have stimulated
unprecedented decimation of sea life.
Long-lining, in which a single boat sets
line across 60 or more miles of ocean, each
baited with up to 10,000 hooks, captures at
least 25 percent unwanted catch. With an
estimated 2 billion hooks set each year, as
much as 88 billion pounds of life a year is
thrown back to the ocean either dead or
dying.

Additionally, trawlers drag nets across
every square inch of the continental shelves
every two years. Fishing the sea floor like
a bulldozer, they level an area 150 times
larger than all forest clear-cuts each year
and destroy seafloor ecosystems.

Aquaculture is no better, since 3 pounds
of wild fish are caught to feed every pound
of farmed salmon. A 2003 study out of the
University of Nova Scotia concluded, based
on data dating from the 1950s, that in the
wake of decades of such onslaught, only 10
percent of all large fish (tuna, swordfish)
and ground fish (cod, hake, flounder) are
left anywhere in the ocean.

Other sea nurseries are also threatened.
Fifteen percent of sea grass beds have
disappeared in the last 10 years, depriving
juvenile fish, manatees and sea turtles of
critical habitats. Kelp beds are also dying
at alarming rates. While at no other time in
history has science taught more about how
the earth's life-support systems work, the
maelstrom of human assault on the seas still
continues. If human failure in governance of
the world's largest public domain is not
reversed quickly, the ocean will soon and
surely reach a point of no return.

The number of hungry and homeless people
in U.S. cities continued to grow in 2005
despite claims of an improved economy.
Increased demand for vital services rose as
needs of the most destitute went unmet,
according to the annual U.S. Conference of
Mayors Report, which has documented
increasing need since its 1982 inception.

The study measures instances of emergency
food and housing assistance in 24 U.S.
cities and utilizes supplemental information
from the U.S. Census and Department of
Labor. More than three-quarters of cities
surveyed reported increases in demand for
food and housing, especially among families.
Food-aid requests expanded by 12 percent in
2005, while aid center and food bank
resources grew by only 7 percent. Service
providers estimated 18 percent of requests
went untended. Housing followed a similar
trend, as a majority of cities reported an
increase in demand for emergency shelter,
often going unmet due to lack of resources.

President Bush's proposed budget for
fiscal 2007, which begins October 2006,
includes a Commerce Department plan to
eliminate the Census Bureau's Survey of
Income and Program Participation. The
proposal marks at least the third White
House attempt in as many years to do away
with federal data collection on politically
prickly economic issues.

Founded in 1984, the Census Bureau survey
follows American families for a number of
years and monitors their use of Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families, Social
Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance,
child care and other health, social-service
and education programs.

Some 415 economists and social scientists
signed a letter and sent it to Congress
shortly after the February release of Bush's
federal budget proposal, urging that the
survey be fully funded as it ''is the only
large-scale survey explicitly designed to
analyze the impact of a wide variety of
government programs on the well-being of
American families.''

Supporters of the survey elimination say
the program costs too much at $40 million
per year. They would kill it in September
and eventually replace it with a scaled-down
version that would run to $9.2 million in
development costs during the coming fiscal
year. Actual data collection would begin in
2009.

The world's most neglected emergency,
according to Jan Egeland, the U.N. Emergency
Relief Coordinator, is the ongoing tragedy
in the Congo, where 6 million to 7 million
have died since 1996 as a consequence of
invasions and wars sponsored by Western
powers trying to gain control of the
region's mineral wealth. At stake is control
of natural resources that are sought by U.S.
corporations: diamonds; tin; copper; gold;
cobalt, an element essential to nuclear,
chemical, aerospace and defense industries;
and, more significantly, coltan and niobum,
two minerals necessary for production of
cell phones and other high-tech electronics.
Eighty percent of the world's coltan
reserves are found in the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC). Niobium is another
high-tech mineral with a similar story.

The high-tech boom of the 1990s caused
the price of coltan to skyrocket to nearly
$300 per pound. In 1996, U.S.-sponsored
Rwandan and Ugandan forces entered eastern
DRC. By 1998, they had seized control and
moved into strategic mining areas. The
Rwandan army was soon making $20 million or
more a month from coltan mining. Though the
price of coltan has since fallen, Rwanda
maintains its monopoly on coltan and the
coltan trade in DRC. Reports of rampant
human-rights abuses pour out of this mining
region.

Coltan makes its way out of the mines to
trading posts where foreign traders buy the
mineral and ship it abroad, mostly through
Rwanda. Firms with the capability turn
coltan into the coveted tantalum powder, and
then sell the magic powder to Nokia,
Motorola, Compaq, Sony and other
manufacturers for use in cell phones and
other products.

Yet as mining in the Congo by Western
companies proceeds at an unprecedented
rate--some $6 million in raw cobalt alone
exiting DRC daily--multinational mining
companies rarely get mentioned in
human-rights reports.

Special Counsel Scott Bloch, appointed by
President Bush in 2004, is overseeing the
virtual elimination of federal whistleblower
rights in the U.S. government.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC),
the agency that is supposed to protect
federal employees who blow the whistle on
waste, fraud and abuse, is dismissing
hundreds of cases while advancing almost
none. According to the Annual Report for
2004 (which was not released until the end
of first quarter of the 2006 fiscal year),
less than 1.5 percent of whistleblower
claims were referred for investigation while
more than 1,000 reports were closed before
they were even opened. Only eight claims
were found to be substantiated, and one of
those included the theft of a desk, while
another included attendance violations.
Favorable outcomes have declined 24 percent
overall, and this is all in the first year
that Bloch has been in office.

Bloch, who has received numerous
complaints since he took office, defends his
first 13 months in office by pointing to a
decline in backlogged cases. Public
Employees for Environmental Responsibility
executive director Jeff Ruch says, "Backlogs
and delays are bad, but they are not as bad
as simply dumping the cases altogether."
According to figures released by Bloch in
February 2005, more than 470 claims of
retaliation were dismissed, and not once had
he affirmatively represented a
whistleblower.

In fact, in order to speed dismissals,
Bloch instituted a rule forbidding his staff
to contact whistleblowers if their
disclosure was deemed incomplete or
ambiguous. Instead, the OSC would dismiss
the matter. As a result, hundreds of
whistleblowers never had a chance to justify
their cases. Ruch notes that these numbers
are limited to only the backlogged cases and
do not include new ones.

On March 3, 2005, OSC staff members,
joined by a coalition of whistleblower
protection and civil rights organizations,
filed a complaint against Bloch. The
complaint specifies instances of illegal gag
orders, cronyism, invidious discrimination
and retaliation by forcing the resignation
of one-fifth of the OSC headquarters legal
and investigative staff. The complaint was
filed with the President's Council on
Integrity and Efficiency, which took no
action on the case for seven months.

This is the third probe into Bloch's
operation in less than two years in office.
The Government Accountability Office and a
U.S. Senate subcommittee both have ongoing
investigations into mass dismissals of
whistleblower cases, crony hires and Bloch's
targeting of gay employees for removal while
refusing to investigate cases involving
discrimination on the basis of sexual
orientation. The case has since been
supplemented with allegations of Bloch
supplying Congress with misleading
information and misusing his office to
support a person espousing creationist views
even though his office had no jurisdiction
to do so.

The Department of Labor has also gotten
on board in a behind-the-scenes maneuver to
cancel whistleblower protections. If it
succeeds, the Labor Department will dismiss
claims by federal workers who report
violations under the Clean Air Act and the
Safe Drinking Water Act. Government
Accountability Project general counsel
Joanne Royce sums up major concerns: "We do
not want public servants wondering whether
they will lose their jobs for acting against
pollution violations of politically
well-connected interests."

The American Civil Liberties Union
released documents of 44 autopsies held in
Afghanistan and Iraq on Oct. 25, 2005.
Twenty-one of those deaths were listed as
homicides. The documents show that detainees
died during and after interrogations by the
Navy Seals, military intelligence and other
government agencies.

"These documents present irrefutable
evidence that U.S. operatives tortured
detainees to death during interrogation,"
said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU.
"The public has a right to know who
authorized the use of torture techniques and
why these deaths have been covered up."

The Department of Defense released the
autopsy reports in response to a Freedom of
Information Act request filed by the ACLU,
the Center for Constitutional Rights,
Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for
Common Sense and Veterans for Peace.

One of 44 U.S. military autopsy reports
reads as follows: "[A] 27-year-old Iraqi
male died while being interrogated by Navy
Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq.
During his confinement, he was hooded,
flex-cuffed, sleep-deprived and subjected to
hot and cold environmental conditions,
including the use of cold water on his body
and hood. The exact cause of death was
'undetermined,' although the autopsy stated
that hypothermia may have contributed to his
death."

An overwhelming majority of the so-called
natural deaths covered in the autopsies were
attributed to "arteriosclerotic
cardiovascular disease" (heart attack).

The Associated Press carried the story of
the ACLU charges on their wire service.
However, a thorough check of Nexus-Lexus and
Proquest electronic data bases, using the
keywords ACLU and autopsy, showed that at
least 95 percent of the daily papers in the
United States didn't pick up the story.

The Department of Defense has been
granted exemption from the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA). In December 2005,
Congress passed the 2006 Defense
Authorization Act, which renders Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) "operational
files" fully immune to FOIA requests, the
main mechanism by which watchdog groups,
journalists and individuals can access
federal documents. Of particular concern to
critics of the Defense Authorization Act is
the DIA's new right to thwart access to
files that may reveal human-rights
violations tied to ongoing
"counterterrorism" efforts.

The rule could, for instance, frustrate
the work of the ACLU and other organizations
that have relied on FOIA to uncover more
than 30,000 documents on the U.S. military's
involvement in the torture and mistreatment
of foreign detainees in Afghanistan,
GuantÃ¡namo Bay and Iraq--including the Abu
Ghraib scandal.

Several key documents that have surfaced
in the advocacy organization's expansive
research originate from DIA files, including
a 2004 memorandum containing evidence that
U.S. military interrogators brutalized
detainees in Baghdad, as well as a report
describing the abuse of Iraqi detainees as
violations of international human rights
law.

According to Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU
attorney involved in the ongoing torture
investigations, "If the Defense Intelligence
Agency can rely on exception or exemption
from the FOIA, then documents such as those
that we obtained this last time around will
not become public at all." The end result of
such an exemption, he told
TheNewStandard.com, is that "abuse is much
more likely to take place, because there's
not public oversight of Defense Intelligence
Agency activity."

Jaffer added that because the DIA
conducts investigations relating to other
national-security-related agencies,
documents covered by the exemption could
contain critical evidence of how other parts
of the military operate as well.

The Newspaper Association of America
informs that due to lobbying efforts of the
Sunshine in Government Initiative and other
open-government advocates, congressional
negotiators imposed an unprecedented
two-year "sunset" date on the Pentagon's
FOIA exemption, ending December 2007.

Despite the 2004 International Court of
Justice (ICJ) decision that called for
tearing down the Wall and compensating
affected communities, construction of the
Wall has accelerated. The route of the
barrier runs deep into Palestinian
territory, aiding the annexation of Israeli
settlements and the breaking of Palestinian
territorial continuity. The World Bank's
vision of "economic development," however,
evades any discussion of the Wall's
illegality.

The World Bank has meanwhile outlined the
framework for a Palestinian Middle East Free
Trade Area (MEFTA) policy in its most recent
report on Palestine published in December
2004: "Stagnation or Revival: Israeli
Disengagement and Palestinian Economic
Prospects."

Central to World Bank proposals is the
construction of massive industrial zones to
be financed by the World Bank and other
donors and controlled by the Israeli
occupation. Built on Palestinian land around
the Wall, these industrial zones are
envisaged as forming the basis of
export-orientated economic development.
Palestinians imprisoned by the Wall and
dispossessed of land can be put to work for
low wages.

The post-Wall MEFTA vision includes
complete control over Palestinian movement.
The report proposes high-tech military gates
and checkpoints along the Wall, through
which Palestinians and exports can be
conveniently transported and controlled. A
supplemental "transfer system" of walled
roads and tunnels will allow Palestinian
workers to be funneled to their jobs, while
being simultaneously denied access to their
land. Sweatshops will be one of very few
possibilities of earning a living for
Palestinians confined to disparate ghettos
throughout the West Bank.

In breach of the ICJ ruling, the United
States has already contributed $50 million
to construct gates along the Wall to "help
serve the needs of Palestinians."

There is widespread speculation that
President Bush, confronted by diminishing
approval ratings and dissent within his own
party, as well as within the military
itself, will begin pulling American troops
out of Iraq this year. A key element of the
drawdown plans not mentioned in the
president's public statements, or in
mainstream media for that matter, is that
the departing American troops will be
replaced by American air power.

Writing in The New Yorker magazine, Seymour Hersh quotes Patrick
Clawson, the deputy director of the
Washington Institute, whose views often
mirror those of Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld, as saying, "We're not planning to
diminish the war. We just want to change the
mix of the forces doing the fighting--Iraqi
infantry with American support and greater
use of air power."

While battle fatigue increases among U.S.
troops, the prospect of using air power as a
substitute for American troops on the ground
has caused great unease within the military.
Air Force commanders in particular have
deep-seated objections to the possibility
that Iraqis will eventually be responsible
for target selection. Hersh quotes a senior
military planner now on assignment in the
Pentagon as saying, "Will the Iraqis call in
air strikes in order to snuff rivals or
other warlords, or to snuff members of their
own sect and blame someone else? Will some
Iraqis be targeting on behalf of al Qaida or
the insurgency or the Iranians?"

Visions of a frightful future in Iraq
should not overshadow the devastation
already caused by present levels of American
air power loosed, in particular, on heavily
populated urban areas of that country. The
tactic of using massively powerful 500- and
1,000-pound bombs in urban areas to target
small pockets of resistance fighters has, in
fact, long been employed in Iraq. No
intensification of the air war is necessary
to make it a commonplace.